One thing they might consider is that demonstrations of, say 500 or less are not significant no matter who’s doing it, no matter how many faxes the demos sent out, no matter what side of the aisle. I remember hearing a Cleveland radio station in early 2007 covering an anti-Iraq demo downtown of seven (!) people. I’ll betcha the PD did too. Think of the resources wasted.

Zell is right (not about the “FU” part in the vid that’s going around, but most else) — they have to produce something people want to buy if they are ever to get/regain the ability to do investigative stuff well. In the meantime, the mostly free help (i.e., bloggers) are apparently picking up the slack, but not that well, as you’ll see in a later post – maybe today, maybe not.

Tom, have you seen some of the recent readership data. Apparently, newspapers still have plenty of readers (though not as many as they would like). The problem seems to be no advertising to underwrite the expenses. Some of the recent data shows that advertisers have deserted faster than readers, which has wrecked the business model. I also think that newspapers are different that the web — the print genre is not the same as the digital genre. But editors are determined to create some hybrid of the two. It seems to me that the cross-breeding — which they embraced late — is not working.